B_10 Qualitative Panel: Milieu-Specific Practices of Endangering and Safeguarding Social Cohesion

This work package (WP) has been conducted since June 2020 in close cooperation between the sections Bremen and Göttingen and is being continued in the second funding phase of RISC with the inclusion of the Hamburg section. Building on international research on political polarization and sociocultural division, it adopts a qualitative empirical perspective to examine the social practices of social cohesion across different social milieus. Social milieus are understood as latent large-scale social groups whose members share similar socioeconomic positions and cultural values. The analytical focus is thus placed on social actors and their patterns of life conduct as shaped by households’ work and living conditions, socioeconomic factors, attitudes, and values.

By focusing on milieu-typical practices of everyday life, the panel study contributes to the guiding questions and thematic priorities of Research Area B in several respects. First, the contrastive sampling strategy makes it possible to capture the positioning of very different social groups. Across milieus, we can compare the relationships between objective resource endowments, subjective self-positioning, and intersubjective status struggles, thereby contributing to the guiding question of cohesion among “unequal” groups. The open interview format provides deep insights into respondents’ relevance structures and thus into practically consequential frames of reference for positioning oneself within status and distributional orders: With whom do “we” stand together—and why? What are the conditions of cohesion, particularly of “cohesion among unequal groups”? When is cohesion perceived as successful or as failing? Who or what threatens “our” cohesion?

Second, the open data collection format (qualitative, narrative interviews) and reconstructive analytical methods make it possible to distinguish between “narrated” and “lived” life by comparing objective biographical data (and, where applicable, historical data) with the biographical self-presentations of interviewees. This allows us to identify discrepancies between aspirations and realities in respondents’ life conduct and cohesion practices. With particular regard to the middle-class milieus represented in our sample, we aim to examine the so-called “life myths of the middle classes” and to analyze how distributional conflicts are negotiated—but also reproduced—within household contexts. Because the panel includes members of all status groups, it also enables us to assess the relationship between subjective perceptions and objective status indicators and to identify differences between upper, middle, and lower status groups.

Third, we examine which negative external effects of milieu-specific cohesion practices become visible and how the social groups negatively affected by these practices respond. By including precarious and marginalized households and focusing on the political dimensions of everyday life, we expect to gain insights into political response patterns to actual or perceived deprivation—for example, with regard to conflicts (or conflict potentials) between objectively precarious and marginalized populations on the one hand and “perceived losers of modernization” on the other.

Fourth, the longitudinal data enable us to distinguish persistent orientations from short-term attitudes and, correspondingly, to differentiate between long-term status conflicts and temporary opinion struggles. The panel structure allows us to examine both the interplay between societal and private crisis experiences and the emergence of new potentials for solidarity and new forms of cohesion. Moreover, the extensive biographical information from the first wave allows social-psychological explanatory approaches to the genesis of right-wing populist or authoritarian orientations in early phases of socialization to be empirically substantiated.

Substantively, the Qualitative Panel is thus situated across all three research focuses of Research Area B. It enables analyses of the effects of declining legitimacy of status and distributional orders and contributes to a deeper understanding of symbolic struggles between social groups—for example, over welfare state benefits and recognition—thereby capturing the effects of transformations of established distributional orders (Research Focus 1 and 2). The assumption that social milieus both form within social networks and shape those networks in turn underpins our analytical approach. Accordingly, the study also focuses on various social junctions: social networks and solidarities in the sphere of paid work, as well as in other important—partly mediatized—domains of everyday life, which make processes of segmentation and practices of symbolic boundary drawing between social milieus (Research Focus 3) analytically accessible.

The panel sample comprises 91 households from different occupational and social status groups in five contrastively selected regions of Germany and is heterogeneously composed with regard to social, economic, and cultural dimensions of inequality. This enables systematic comparisons between different milieus, as well as between respondents within the same milieu and the life conduct patterns, attitudes, and—sometimes conflictual, sometimes consensual—practices of successful cohesion observed there. In addition, the study allows for the analysis of social practices across different status groups and their interactions across multiple life domains (work, family, neighborhood, etc.) and institutional structures.

Owing to its panel design, the study makes it possible to examine change over time—both in terms of future expectations and planning, and as responses and adaptations to societal transformation processes. In this way, we can systematically analyze the intended and unintended effects of social practices across different status groups and milieus on both the strengthening and the endangerment of social cohesion. By continuing the study in two additional waves, the longitudinal potential of the Qualitative Panel is fully exploited: dynamics and patterns of persistence become visible over extended periods at both the individual and household levels. Through repeated interviews, we observe how respondents deal with new social, political, and economic—sometimes crisis-ridden—transformations, whether and how attitudes change, and how stable or fragile orientations and practices prove to be.

The comparison of different social milieus also provides insights into unequal exposure to crisis-driven transformation dynamics. Empirically, the synchronic and diachronic practices of life conduct observed among our interviewees have been productively conceptualized using the categories of exit, voice, and loyalty. In the second phase, we aim to further elaborate these conceptualizations, with a particular focus on milieu-specific conditions of practice: Which social groups remain loyal to society and its institutions despite possible dissatisfaction (loyalty)? Which groups are particularly vocal in their demands for societal change or preservation (voice)? And which milieus primarily respond to societal transformations and their own discontent through withdrawal—and why (exit)?